Is the Mighty NRA Beginning to Topple?

There are signs that the National Rifle Association's power to block gun-control legislation is beginning to slip after the mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut, last Friday.

Most visibly, if also vaguely, President Obama said Sunday that he'd "use whatever power this office holds . . . in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this." More surprisingly, and maybe more tellingly, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an unyielding gun-rights supporter and NRA member, said Monday, “I don’t know anyone in the sporting or hunting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anyone that needs 30 rounds in a clip to go hunting. I mean, these are things that need to be talked about.” Joe Scarborough, the former Republican Congressman who is host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, said the shooting made his former pro-gun views suddenly "irrelevant" and called support for the assault weapon the killer used "nonsense." Those people weren't saying anything like that before now.

Meanwhile the gun industry is suddenly looking so unpalatable that Cerberus Capital Management has quickly announced that it will sell the company that made the gun used in Newtown, even though, according to Nathan Vardi, it will have to do so "as a desperate seller." And the NRA itself has gone into hiding, apparently, its website and twitter feed strangely silent. In fact, NRA supporters have been strangely silent, too. On Sunday every single pro-gun senator, 31 of them, refused host David Gregory's invitation to appear on Meet the Press.

Could this be the beginning of a major shift? The NRA's power appeared for a long time to be virtually absolute. Last year after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot, her colleague Carolyn McCarthy of New York introduced a bill to ban high-capacity magazines like the one used in that multiple murder. More than 130 Democrats became co-sponsors, and not a single Republican. After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, Congress tried to close the loophole that lets unlicensed dealers sell guns at gun shows without background checks on their buyers. That bill died a slow death in committee. Debra Maggart, a lifetime NRA member with a perfect voting record on gun issues, got driven out of the Tennessee legislature in this year's election because of her position on a single bill that pitted gun rights against property rights. "Because of N.R.A. bully tactics, legislators are not free to openly discuss the merits of gun-related legislation," she now says. "The N.R.A.'s agenda is more about raising money from their members by creating phantom issues instead of promoting safe, responsible gun ownership."

Meanwhile the evidence that the laxness of America's gun laws clearly correlates with its high level of gun violence mounts and mounts. The chart here presents it especially starkly. As Nicholas Kristof points out, "Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries" and "more Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined." In Australia, on the other hand, a mass murder of 35 people in 1996 led to a ban on rapid-fire long guns, and the number of mass shootings in the country dropped from 13 in the 18 previous years to zero in the 14 years since.

The dominance of NRA-backed gun libertarianism in the U.S. is not as timeless as many think. It is a recent phenomenon in historical terms. As Jeffrey Toobin explains, courts agreed for more than a century that, in the Second Amendment,

the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Then in 1977, Toobin writes, "a coup d'etat at the group's annual convention . . . brought a group of committed political conservatives to power" and they "pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as 'a fraud.'"

But the NRA never let up. According to TheNew York Times, "Gun control proponents say that perception of the N.R.A.'s vast political clout largely dates to the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans seized control of the House and Senate after passage of an assault weapons ban under President Clinton. That image was further enhanced in the 2000 election, when the N.R.A. claimed credit for helping elect George W. Bush to the White House."

Now we've arrived at the curious situation where it is accepted that the Second Amendment, despite being about "the right to bear arms," can allow the banning of military weapons but prevents any outlawing of handguns. That's according to Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008. As Toobin writes,

Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century.

Toobin concludes that "it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law." If that's true, than it's also true that there are signs that the politics of guns is starting to shift right now, from Senator Manchin's and Joe Scarborough's public changes of heart to the fact that the NRA spent $14 million to defeat President Obama's reelection and failed.

There have been times in American history when public opinion decisively altered, never to go back. We can hardly believe that our nation once permitted slavery. We find it hard to comprehend that women were not allowed to vote, or that interracial marriages were illegal. Institutionalized racism became universally unthinkable only in recent decades. Will we someday look back and wonder how we could ever have allowed the legal ownership of assault rifles with high-capacity magazines, and why we felt that virtually anyone could possess a gun originally designed for military slaughter?

Nobody disagrees that the killing of 20 first-graders in a small town in Connecticut was a tragedy that must never happen again. Now the question is what will change to keep it from happening again.